PURPOSE: The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) Culture of Health Prize (the Prize) recognizes communities that have come together around a commitment to health, opportunity, and equity through collaboration and inclusion, especially with historically marginalized populations and those facing the greatest barriers to good health. The Prize honors those communities that are working to give everyone the opportunity to live well, including residents that are often left behind. A Culture of Health recognizes that where we live—our access to affordable and stable homes, quality schools, reliable transportation—make a difference in our opportunities to thrive, and ultimately all of this profoundly affects our health and well-being. The Prize elevates the compelling stories of community members who are working together to transform neighborhoods, schools, businesses, and more—so that better health flourishes everywhere, for everyone.

ABOUT THE PRIZE: At RWJF, building a Culture of Health has become the central aim of what we do, with a goal of giving every person across the nation an opportunity to live the healthiest life possible. Communities are already leading the way to drive local change, and ensuring all residents have an opportunity to make healthy choices in their schools, workplaces and neighborhoods. The RWJF Culture of Health Prize, a collaboration between RWJF and the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute, is the Foundation’s way of honoring communities—urban, rural, tribal, large or small—that are beacons of hope and progress for healthier people, families, and places.

ELIGIBILITY: The RWJF Culture of Health Prize honors U.S. communities; submissions representing the work of a single organization will not be considered. With the exception of previous Prize winners and 2018 finalists, all past applicants are eligible to reapply for 2019 (2018 finalists may reapply in 2020).

APPLICATION PROCESS: Through the RWJF Culture of Health Prize application process, a community comes together to tell their inspiring stories of collaboration, action, and results. Communities should understand they are applying for a prize and not a grant. The Prize recognizes work that has already been accomplished so there is no required workplan or budget. To be competitive, it is imperative that Prize applicants keep a community-wide focus in mind through all phases of the competition.

Every year, a new edition of What Color is Your Parachute? is published, and every summer, I re-read the book and am inspired an reinvigorated anew. Additionally, something different jumps out at me every time I make my way through. This year it is “The Remedy” section, the solutions presented to job-hunters in facing the multifaceted challenges presented by the changing world of work. For many reasons, I think that it is important to focus on the solutions, and so review them here as a reminder of how the world of work is changing and consequently, how we can be thinking about changing the way we approach our “career orienteering” in turn.

What follows are my “top ten” of the eighteen principles explored in the book. For the complete list, see Dick Bolles’ website, and the book’s website. Also check out these additional resources, including my previous reviews here on Career Linguist:

Essentially, start with you and your interests. Find a job that fits YOU, and not the other way around. Bolles calls this the “creative” as opposed to the “traditional” route.

Principle 2: The Importance of a Self-Inventory

According to Bolles’ research, when you begin your search from a self-inventory, you are looking at a success rate of 84%, as opposed to those searches which begin with researching the job market (asking which jobs are in demand, which are “hot”), which result in only a 4-28% success at best.

As the WaLK series on this blog exploring the work interrogatives would suggest, I am delighted to hear this attention to the importance of questions. Simply put, the three central questions Richard Bolles would have you ask are:

What are the transferable skills you most love to use?

Where would you most love to use these skills?

How do you find the name and title of such jobs, places that offer such work, plus the name of the person-who-has-the-power-to-hire-you-for-the-job-you-want?

Watch this space, as I have much MUCH more to say about the role of questions (a new book’s worth in fact), but these three are a wonderful beginning!!!

Principle 4: Search for What you Love, Not Just for What You Can Do

In Bolles’ words: “passion plus competency, not just competency alone, is key to securing employment”

Principle 6: You Must Always Prioritize

Or as I like to say it “you must choose one” – although, in today’s world of work, increasingly people do often choose more than one job at a time – but bottom line: you can’t do everything, at least not all at once (for more on this idea, see last week’s book review of How to Be Everything). Find strategies for ranking your priorities that will help guide your decision-making. In parachute, it is the “Prioritizing Grid” – in my current work, it is the tool of the work interrogatives (more soon – watch this space!).

Principle 7: Go After Any Organization That Interests You, Whether or Not They are Known to Have a Vacancy

This one kinda speaks for itself

Principle 11: Use Contacts or “Bridge-People” to Get In for an Interview

This is probably the very best way to reach out, and it is predicated on trust. Take time to build trust by being vulnerable yourself, including asking for small things, a practice that honors the ask.

Principle 12: Use Three Different Kinds of Interviews in Your Search:

It’s not only about the job interview! Make sure to build your interviewing skills, build your knowledge, and build your network of connections and opportunities by also conducting practice interviews and informational interviews.

Principle 13: Keep in Mind that in an Interview There are Only Five Questions an Employer is Really Concerned About

This all about the job interview now. The five questions are:

Why are you here?

What can you do for us?

What kind of person are you?

What distinguishes you from say the nineteen other people whom we are interviewing for the job?

Can we afford you?

Putting yourself on the other side of the desk means owning the perspective that informs these questions, taking it on as if it were your own, or as I call it: shifting your deictic center.

Principle 17: Remember, Job-Hunting is by Its Very Nature a Long Process of Rejection

I love this one!!! And it seems like the perfect place to end this post as well. You can expect that the pattern of your job search will sound something like: “ NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO YES YES” As Bolles puts it: “after each rejection, take comfort in the fact that you are one ‘no’ closer to ‘yes’ (or possibly even two of them).”

He ends the chapter thusly:

”Cheer up! Yes, it is a brand-new job-hunting world out there. But you are not powerless, up against the vast forces you cannot control. You contrio this one thing above all else: how you search. And that, my friend, is the key to finding not only work, but meaningful work. You were put on this earth for a reason. You need to find it. These are the steps”

(or ten of them at least!)

So remember:

THEY need you!

And the work you do now now is worth it, so take the time

What are your own sustaining practices, strategies, and lessons learned from the job hunt? We would love to hear from you! Share in the comments, on Twitter @careerlinguist, or on LinkedIn.

It’s been a while since we have reviewed a book over here on Career Linguist, but a conversation over on the CL (Mighty) Network today reminded me about how much I appreciated Emilie Wapnick’s book How to Be Everythingand I thought I would share some of my thoughts by way of kicking off a summer “work books” series. Stay tuned for more thoughts about books that tackle subjects like finding meaning and purpose in work, and please recommend your favorites! @careerlinguist

Reading this book was one big huge “a-ha” for me, in ways that I think that many folks who have pursued a PhD will recognize. Emilie is known for having coined the term “multipotentialite,” aka “multipod,” aka “multi-passionate” or a variety of other descriptors (scanner, renaissance person, generalist). As I read this book, and worked through her “you may be a mulitpotentialite if…”s, I recognized myself in many of the attributes she describes, including that I love to learn, I am typically looking for a new challenge after about 3-4 years on any project, I can often be found at the intersection of two (or more) ideas, trying to work out how one thing may be applied to / used as a way of understanding the other, and that I seem to gravitate towards / thrive on work that pulls my attention in various directions simultaneously.

An important caveat before we proceed any further: this book is how to BE everything, and not how to DO everything. We all have limited time and energy, and although we may have many interests, the goal is to have a good life, so we need to think about ways to strategize.

So, to begin with, one very helpful analogy she gives is that of the stovetop. We can only have so many things simmering at once, and likely at least a couple of them are on the back burner (at least for now). That said, her book offers four main approaches to moving through varied interests sequentially or simultaneously (or both): the Group Hug, Slash, Einstein, and Phoenix.

The Group Hug Approach is to find a job that is inherently multi – or inter-disciplinary. In the book, Emilie names teaching, urban planning, and architecture as worlds of work that would allow someone to wear many hats and shift between several domains. In my own professional life, I have found that work in consulting, editing, career development, and translation and interpretation also allow for the exploration of many domains, and additionally feature built-in opportunities to learn and do research as part of the job.

Another aspect of this strategy – which as I reflect on it has been a big component of the advice I offer to Career Linguists – is to approach hiring managers (for those who are currently job seeking) or existing managers (for those who are currently employed) with your innovative ideas for application and connection. Your out-of-the box thinking and ideas for how to expand and grow an existing position may well be something that they are excited to (or at least willing to) let you try out, although of course, as Emilie advises, it is always best to frame in terms of how the organization will benefit – what’s in it for them?

The Slash Approach Is best for folks with interests that widely differ. The idea here is to pursue multiple jobs that are intentionally part-time so as to allow for expression of completely separate passion projects.

For now, know that most of these authors encourage would-be “leapers” to try the “side hustle” for a while before up and quitting a main gig if it is not sufficiently “group-hug-gy”.

The Einstein Approach is about finding a full-time job gig that fully supports you financially (named for Albert Einstein, who famously worked in a Patent Office full-time and did his scientific experiments before and after work and on the weekends), but which leaves you with the time and energy to pursue your other passions on the side. Crucial to this strategy is finding something that is mentally simulating rather than mentally exhausting, but at the same time is not so engaging that it is all consuming. Wapnicks’s observation is that one key to success here may be choosing work that draws on completely separate interests and utilizes different parts of the brain for the two so as to allow for the energy to work entirely outside of a day job. My personal take here is that such arrangements were easier to find in Einstein’s day. That said, technology and modern approaches to remote work, and more flexible work schedules – including part-time arrangements) may make up the difference in many ways.

And finally, there’s The Phoenix Approach which I guess would be the best way to describe my own career path, especially if you start the clock back when I was an investment banker in the 90’s. The Phoenix works in a single industry for a period of some duration and then moves to “something completely different” to quote our friends at Monty Python.

Taking a step back, I would argue that many academics were likely attracted to academia in the first place because of their own multipotentiality. My own deciding to quit my job to go back to grad school in 2001 could well be seen as an expression of my “Phoenix” approach. And because we also love to learn, we are drawn to institutions of higher learning, but the trouble is that if/when the academic route doesn’t work out, or ceases to be as interesting as it once was for any number of reasons (including a possible “call of the Phoneix”), we get stuck in thinking that the academic context is the only place where we can find such autonomy / flexibility / continual learning.

Bottom line: The world of work is changing, and one of the major ways in which it is changing is that change is now going to be the norm. Having many interests and being good at a number of things is a strategic advantage. I am deeply grateful for this way of thinking about career navigation and orienteering, and I welcome your own thoughts and experiences: do you see any of the multipotentialite in you?

As for us, what should we read and review next? I am always on the lookout for great books that help me think about ways of building meaning in work and life. This month in the CL (Mighty) Network, we are reading and discussing Daniel Goleman’s book Focus. Join the network to join us for that discussion on June 26th!

Announcing the launch of the Career Linguist (CL) Network: A community for career linguists to encourage and learn from one another; to support career development; and to stay inspired about the field of study that connects us! The CL network opens to the public on Feb 1st!

About the platform
The Mighty Networks platform enables me to bring together a bunch of different kinds of things that I have been (and have been wanting to have been) doing for a while now including LOTS OF ACTIVITIES: weekly Working sessions (where we come together to get stuff done!!!), biweeklyCheck-ins (making space for connection, discovery, and opportunity), and Themed discussions: coming up in Feb, book club discussion of Adam Grant’s Give and Take and interactive sessions on storytelling for career. The Stories Around the Campfire series will now be hosted on the CL Network (linguists sharing stories about work), and we also have mentors who have made themselves available to field questions about chosen topics and professional fields of practice.

The Career Linguist network has been enormously helpful as I transition from an academic position into consulting. It is inspiring to have a place to connect with people doing interesting and varied work outside academia. The Working Sessions have been particularly helpful and a great way for me to get to know others in our field as we work independently on a specific task for a set period of time. Anna is supportive, encouraging and the perfect facilitator. She has helped me understand the difference between a “task” and a “project” which has helped my work flow tremendously. I will definitely continue to attend when I can!

Kristy Cardellio, Ph.D.
St Petersburg, FL

I find the CL network a group of interesting and engaging career-minded individuals that are invested in not only working on their own area of expertise but also curious to hear about and provide support, if applicable, to their fellow members. The women who participate weekly in the work sessions I have attended act as a team of accountability partners that seem to keep me on track and allow me to mutually provide support for them. Anna Marie Trester, our host, is always engaging, providing a gentle guidance that allows us to focus on the work at hand in a structured group environment, using our stated intention to propel us effortlessly through our chosen assignment for each session. Because we are using the pomodoro method, of 20 minute intervals, it seems to take some of the pressure off, allowing me to concentrate on this chunk of work, rather than stressing over the full project. In the past few weeks of attending the CL work sessions, I have managed to accomplish more of my project than I have alone in a much longer time frame. I thoroughly enjoy this process and am grateful to Dr. Trester for creating such an inviting, congenial, interactive environment for peers to accomplish their goals.

As 2017 draws to a close, as is our tradition, we are taking some time to “look back to look forward” over here at Career Linguist, reflecting on this past year and thinking about what should come next by counting down the five most viewed pages and posts in 2017!!

And here they are:

#5 How to Begin a one-stop-shop for job-seekers. All the things you need to be thinking about as you start applying your skills and training as a linguist to industries and organizations that you’re interested in.

#1 For the second year running – 50 organizations is the most viewed page!!! This resource features organizations who have advertised for and/or have hired linguists and language/communication experts. Have you found a job using this list as a resource? Would love to hear your story! What other organizations belong on this list? How can it continue to be made more useful?

What else was new this year:

2017 saw the launch of a new series over here at Career Linguist (The Worlds of Work: WoW series) and a wholly new endeavor: Career Camp. Career Camp is five weeks of focused activities and stories designed to engage “career orienteering!!” We successfully betatested in early summer, and just last week wrapped up our 2nd camp!! From this – inspired by the weekly exchange of stories at this virtual campfire – we spun off a new series Stories Around the Campfire featuring linguists who share their perspective on the challenges out there in the world that we can bring skills and passion to solving. For a limited time, catch up on all the stories that you missed right here at Career Linguist.com.